Neopets reached reached an almighty crescendo of popularity some time in the early 2000s. In 2001, it was ranked as the 4th most popular site on the internet. To put that in perspective, in that same year Google was ranked at 12th. It’s been on my mind lately: what ever happened to it? It was a little over a week ago…

With the outrageous success of The Sims and its subsequent titles, it’s easy to forget that Maxis’s flagship title was preceded by a great many games where you could play god in other ways. While obviously, manipulating simulated humans to do our bidding—from following their dreams of becoming a hand model, to being…

When I was in my teens, I decided I was going to follow Shintoism, completely overlooking the fact that it is more a set of nuanced, culturally-specific customs ingrained in the collective Japanese psyche rather than a religion that one could simply “join”. Upon further research into the rituals and practices it…

Growing up being gay and into video games is an interesting sort of purgatory. While there were certainly many other interests I could’ve taken up that would’ve been far less accepting of my sexual orientation, gaming as a form of creative expression lacked any of the gay characters—let alone role models—that seemed…

At face value, Killing Time at Lightspeed looks like a browser-based text adventure, or perhaps some sort of dated social-media app you found on a phone you left in a drawer and forgot you had. But at its heart, KTAL is much more than that, using all the best elements of text-based adventures to bear a point-and-click…

It’s been twelve years since F-Zero Climax. That’s over a decade that Captain Falcon has been falcon punching and thrusting away—in a less savoury fashion—on the Super Smash Bros. stage without so much as thinking of the Blue Falcon. Although it’s been a joy seeing his (fantastic) legs far more since he traded in the…

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Legend of Zelda series, and to celebrate, I wanted to write about some of the women who inspired me when I was growing up. Ocarina of Time was revolutionary in its own right, being the first 3D Zelda and pioneering a video gaming style which would later be recreated in…